Tag Archives: Brian De Palma

We watched â€œOld Schoolâ€ based on the enthusiastic recommendations of our friends. These friends, itâ€™s worth mentioning, are the ones who recommended â€œEuro Tripâ€ all those months back, and despite the various movie triumphs weâ€™ve had based on their suggestions since, the old wound runs deep!

â€œOld Schoolâ€ doesnâ€™t clear up the scar tissue, but it at least alleviates the remnant pain a little.

Luke Wilson, Will Ferrell and Vince Vaughan shamble their way through a mildly raucous movie that isnâ€™t quite shocking enough to be a screwball romp, but isnâ€™t sharp enough to be an insightful relationship comedy.

There are a few pretty good laughs scattered through the movie, and Wilson and Ferrell give likeable performancesâ€¦ Even Vaughanâ€™s totally amoral oiliness has itâ€™s charm.

The film is a little all over the place, though, never sure which of its plot threads or elements are really the point, and as such it doesnâ€™t hold together all that well as a movie â€“ there are plenty of decent quotable moments, but the sketchy pacing makes the whole thing fall a little flat.

â€œThe Hangoverâ€ features an almost identical character dynamic to â€œOld Schoolâ€ â€“ and if we go back further I guess weâ€™d find similar archetypes at play in Todd Phillipsâ€™ earlier â€œRoad Tripâ€ â€“ but with the newer movie the writer and director have a clearer sense of where the movieâ€™s strengths are than they did with â€œOld Schoolâ€, and the rolling motion of the plot â€“ the search for the impending groom through the fog of a devastating (read â€œawesome!â€) stag party â€“ gives it a pace and clarity lacking in the earlier one.

It also has frankly more impressive talent in the reluctant-straight-fall-guy and out-of-control man-child roles â€“ Wilson and Ferrell do good work, but Ed Helms and Zach Galifianakis shine in â€œThe Hangoverâ€. If doing a sterling job at playing a handicapped or mentally ill character can usually be considered a fast track to award recognition, it seems a shame that Galifianakis will probably not get consideration for his lovably perverse and broken odd-ball here. His performance is what makes the movie stand apart from other similar romps, giving it most of its shocks, as well as any pathos present.

Mind you, as fun as â€œThe Hangoverâ€ is, itâ€™s not a classic, and the above observation could easily be said of the brilliant Bobcat Goldthwait in the not so brilliant â€œPolice Academyâ€ movies.

Elephant Words NEEDS YOU!

Elephant Words is a website where a bunch of writers write things inspired by a weekly image…

(It used to be six writers at a time, but now the more the merrier!)

The weekly image gets sent out to the mailing list on a Sunday, and the deadline for new posts is the following Saturday. The pieces can be any format or genre - the only limitation is pieces have to be under 800 words.

It’s not so much what he says - which I really think is idiotic but he’s allowed to think idiotic things - it’s the cult of personality that surrounds him, and that he often seems happy to feed off of… and…

Well, you might remember reading a huge blog rant by him, wherein he complained that anyone who believed that he really thought this stuff because they’d read it in a “newspaper” - which he’d no sooner agree to be interviewed by than you would agree to be raped, by the way - must be stupid, and that he’d been taken out of context and misquoted. And you might think “Well, Fry has clearly addressed it, so what’s the problem?”

But this video ISN’T what Fry was ranting about. He was getting all self-righteously kiddy-spanked (apparently butt-hurt has connotations I’d never considered before, but kiddy-spanked sounds stupid) about a print interview in which he claims to have been edited and stripped of context to the point where it appears that he is sincerely saying that women don’t like sex and only do it to gain from a transaction of some kind, the proof of which is that they don’t hang out in parks to have sex, and prostitutes have to be paid to do it.

He spends several hundred (thousand?) words berating anybody stupid enough to believe the hatchet job the journalists did on him, by making it sound like he said…

Well, the exact same thing he says in this video, apparently unedited, and clearly sincerely (if he isn’t being sincere, he’s a way better actor than his career thus far has suggested).

I have no idea why the journos who picked up on the magazine article didn’t pick up on this video as well. And I haven’t seen Fry discuss how misrepresented he was in this video anywhere. And the amount of cognitive dissonance I see in his character, and the way people flock to him in such a credulous and awestruck way does my head in.

Alan Davies can fuck off, too. LOVED that guy’s stand-up, but a bully is a bully is a bully. It actually caught me quite by surprise in his case.